No Child Left Behind waiver granted to Massachusetts, 9 other states

Photo by Pablo Martinez Monsivais / Associated PressPresident Barack Obama, accompanied by Education Secretary Arne Duncan speaks about No Child Left Behind, Thursday in the East Room of the White House in Washington.

President Barack Obama Thursday freed 10 states, including Massachusetts, from the strict and sweeping requirements of the No Child Left Behind education law in exchange for promises to improve the way schools teach and evaluate students.

“It doesn’t lessen the mission to achieve and the deadline is more realistic,” Holyoke Superintendent David L. Dupont said.

With the waiver, schools will no longer be required to ensure all students be proficient in math and English by 2014, a deadline all superintendents called unrealistic. Every year each school was required to show more progress toward that goal or face sanctions.

This year 80 percent of schools and 90 percent of school districts statewide fail to meet the so-called adequate yearly progress goals, Massachusetts Education Commissioner Mitchell D. Chester said in writing.

The state will continue to keep its system of identifying troubled schools. Those labeled Level 4, or underperforming, must comply with state demands and face takeovers if they fail to improve. There are two in Holyoke and 10 in Springfield.

The waiver will allow the state to focus more on closing performance gaps between high achieving students and children who are struggling, Chester said.

“Massachusetts has already adopted legislation that targets low performing schools and districts, rigorous standards for students to ensure readiness for college and careers and regulations to evaluate educators. This waiver will enable us to build on those key reforms by calling out and remediating performance gaps, incentivizing continuous improvement of schools and districts, rewarding strong performance, and aggressively intervening in the lowest performing schools,” he said.

The waiver will require schools to continue Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment Systems testing in most grades and will not change the common core standards, which dictate what children must learn at each grade.

One of the benefits is schools will no longer have to use a portion of their federal Title 1 grant money, designed to boost reading and math skills for poor children, to hire private companies to offer after-school educational programs.

Holyoke spends about $250,000 on vendors. It can now use that money to fund programs to focus on specific goals, Dupont said.

“The big one is it allows us flexibility on how we support students,” he said.

“With this waiver, the district can work together with teachers, principals and (administrators) and we can decide where we can best makes improvements. It gives us more latitude,” she said.

The state already judges students using several methods, including tracking the growth each student and watching graduation rates. Drugan said she feels those evaluations are far more helpful than those used by No Child Left Behind.

In a prepared statement, Springfield Superintendent Alan J. Ingram agreed the change will give the schools more flexibility.

The waiver will allow the city to more away from the “cookie cutter regulations” and allow the city to focus on reforms that are tailored to strengths and weaknesses of students, he said.

He cited Gerena School, one of the Level 4 schools, that saw big improvements on the MCAS last year. The achievements came through staff ideas including giving teachers more time to plan together, focusing on attendance and targeting improvements in students’ reading comprehension.

The other nine states to receive the waivers are Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Minnesota, New Jersey, Oklahoma and Tennessee. The only state that applied for the flexibility and did not get it, New Mexico, is working with the administration to get approval, the White House said.

The move is a tacit acknowledgment that the law’s main goal, getting all students up to par in reading and math by 2014, is not within reach.

Obama said he was acting because Congress had failed to update the law despite widespread agreement it needs to be fixed.

A total of 28 other states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico have signaled they plan to seek waivers.

Material from the Associated Press and Jeanette DeForge, staff writer for The Republican, was used in this report.